Part 4: Defying Fear

Fourth in a six-part series

During a brief holiday on Long Island in the summer of 1987, Louis Fulgoni unexpectedly started feeling dizzy and light-headed. When he finally saw his doctor back in Manhattan a few days later – somewhat reluctantly, because he anticipated bad news – he was diagnosed with pneumocystis pneumonia, a common illness among people with compromised immunity. And there was more: Besides confirming that it was PCP, Louis’s doctor informed him that his HIV test result had come back positive.

Louis had long dreaded this news and talked about his fears in our many free-form lunchtime conversations at the office – he at his drafting table and me at my desk. Still, he was not really shocked. He later said he would have been more surprised if he was HIV-negative. His exploits in the city’s bars, baths and tearooms had continued at least until the early 1980s, before the dangers of unprotected sex and HIV transmission were widely understood. By 1987, with AIDS cases already rampant in New York, he knew he was at risk. Once, at our office, he said it was conceivable that he had evaded the virus somehow, but he didn’t sound convinced even by his own cautious optimism.

Untitled, oil on canvas, mid-1980s.

I remember visiting Louis and Michael McKee after the HIV diagnosis. Michael had filled me in over the phone and I said I would come over. Purposely avoiding the elevator for extra time to steel my nerves, I walked up the stairs to their fourth-floor apartment with a knot in my stomach. I didn’t know what to say or what state Louis would be in, and I was afraid that my expression would betray how frightened I was for him. When I got to the apartment, however, he was stoic and brave. “It’s not a death sentence,” he said, and I agreed, anxious to bolster his optimism – and mine. But in effect, we were kidding ourselves. At a time when there were still no proven drugs to prevent or treat AIDS, an HIV diagnosis was something akin to condemnation. The only questions, it seemed (though none of us voiced them), were what opportunistic infections Louis would have to cope with and how long he could survive.

Louis recovered from his bout of pneumonia with help from mega-doses of antibiotics. A few weeks later, he returned to our office. His doctor prescribed a regimen of AZT, one of the only AIDS medications then available. He dutifully took the large white capsules every four hours. No one knew it until years later, but AZT ultimately proved to be an ineffective stand-alone treatment for AIDS. Still, Louis remained asymptomatic for the next year and a half. He cut down on alcohol, watched his diet, saw a therapist and kept up a busy social life. He seemed anxious and depressed sometimes, but that was understandable and not entirely out of character. And if anything, he became even more prolific as an artist.

It was as though, after the initial shock of the diagnosis, he made a firm decision that illness would not define him. He seemed driven to create and began to work almost obsessively on a series of more than twenty-five prints and pointillist paintings inspired by the yantra, a geometric design that serves as an aid to Tantric meditation. He also stepped up his production of masks. While the Tantric prints suggested mindfulness, many of the masks bore terrifying expressions, which were not subtle in their manifestation of existential dread. In a way, they were all self-portraits of someone facing the abyss and either screaming or laughing at the precipice.

Inevitably, many of Louis’s friends and acquaintances also fell ill. Like him, some of them found solace in their own creative impulses. One friend, Tony Torres, an aspiring actor, was actually diagnosed a few months before Louis. Tony plummeted into depression at first, but then emerged with renewed energy as part of an acting troupe composed entirely of people with AIDS. They called themselves, plainly and proudly, the People with AIDS Theater Workshop. Their productions were an expression of the struggle to keep moving forward against the tide of stigma from society and, often, disdain from their own families. In a period when public figures like Jerry Falwell and William F. Buckley referred to AIDS as “the gay plague” and suggested forcibly tattooing people with AIDS to flag the supposed threat they posed, the performances were both an act of resistance and an assertion of humanity.

At the start of each show, members of the company would rise collectively and proclaim, “We’re people. People with AIDS.” They would go on to dramatize the cruelty and absurdity of homophobic paranoia about the disease and to skewer the atrocity of government inaction in the face of the crisis. President Reagan had only recently uttered the word “AIDS” in public for the first time. That utterance came after four years in which AIDS had killed thousands, and one year after Reagan was re-elected under the banner of “morning in America.”

I was inspired by the way the People with AIDS Theater Workshop looked sickness and death in the eye, defying fear with a mixture of courage and camp. That spirit was manifest offstage, as well. On a summer night in a loft downtown, after one of the workshop’s productions, I joined Louis, Michael, Tony, some of the actors and about a hundred other people at a bacchanal that lasted far into the witching hours. Quite a few of the partygoers were visibly ill. One emaciated man had checked himself out of the hospital for the night and showed off his IV shunt to prove it. But the music was loud, the smoke was thick and the coke was pure. There was a giddy feeling in the crowd that reminded me of childhood nights when I kept myself awake with the dread of facing the nuns at school the next day. If we just stay up, everyone seemed silently to hope, maybe tomorrow will never arrive.

I would later recall that party and other, more prosaic moments — like sitting on the Barcelona chair in Louis’s living room, smoking and making idle conversation with him and Tony — and I’d be startled by the realization that I was the only survivor. The endless rave had been an illusion. All the bravery in the world couldn’t hold back the cold light of dawn.